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All along Ridley Scott has filled the background of his fugitive's escape with the vestments of a mobile consumer civilization-the oil-fields, freight trains, trailer trucks, crop-dusting planes, and ribbons of highways bordered by telephone, power, and telegraph Unes.11 Gradually this scenery (surely idiomatic of a long history of colonialistic exploitation of the continent) gives way to abandoned shacks and farming equipment, dirt roads, and the blank staring faces of the excluded and desolate with whom the protagonists, particularly Louise, share a doomed familiarity.

Thelma and Louise is a popular commercial film that has stirred extensive critical discussion of the woman's place in Hollywood action drama. With its self-conscious gender switch on road film outlaws, it has provoked a fresh consideration of sexual stereotyping in film genre and in cultural ideology generally. But writer Callie Khouri and producer-director Ridley Scott's film is more than a satire on patriarchal presumption. As I hope to demonstrate, Thelma and Louise not only invites consideration of Hollywood's road rebel history from a feminine perspective, but relates it to a deeper problem of subjectivity in contemporary consumer culture.

The media response to this film was immediate and provocational. After placing Thelma and Louise with other 1991 productions that concern women's revenge such as Mortal Thoughts, V.l. Warshawski, and Sleeping With the Enemy, Time magazine's June 24 cover story, "Gender Bender," goes on to assert that "A white-hot debate rages over whether Thelma and Louise celebrates liberated females, male bashers-or outlaws" (Schickel 52). Richard Schickel's byline is accompanied by one from Margaret Carlson, who denies the film's claim to a feminist sensibility altogether because of its reliance on a male action mode (57). Either way, the confrontational gender stance identified in and extrapolated from the film by Time's writers and editors exemplifies the news media's tendency to over-simplify and exploit topical social conflicts represented in cultural narratives. This reductionist approach to a complex film typifies the effects of commercial pressures in mass market journalism and hardly moves beyond the kind of solicitous oppositionalism that characterizes American sociopolitical debate. Schickel's symptomatic reading of Thelma and Louise may be correct when he asserts that it "is satirically aware of the violent and depersonalizing traditions of our visual popular culture" (56). But exactly how this film links its particular images of "violent and depersonalizing... popular culture" (which sounds like an entity one could blame) into specific chains of meaning remains to be interpreted.

Some of these linkages have been addressed in recent symposia on this film carried in Cineaste and Film Quarterly. The authors in both publications tend to mistrust this popular movie's rather comfortable inclinations toward violent Hollywood spectacle. Thelma and Louise is seen, for example, to be either an imperfect satirical analogy of the woman's dilemma in contemporary America, or an unrealistic female liberation fantasy that backhandedly supports reactionary violence. To what extent the film's violent fantasy seduction is modified by a selfconsciousness of generic and mythic traditions is generally recognized by Leo Braudy, who writes in Film Quarterly:

Many of the more ridiculous attacks against the film took its assertions as somehow realistic arguments about women, men, guns, and violence. But however real Thelma and Louise may be, it's not realistic. Its violence erupts within a hard-edged satire of wannabe heroism and consumer identity, and it builds to its conclusion through a series of scenes that emphasize the way in which Scott and Gallic Khouri's main characters move out of this heightened satiric reality into myth. (29)

While I agree with the broad outline of Braudy's assessment, exactly how this text conflates its characters' "consumer identity" with genre and gender concerns requires elaboration.

Genre and Gender

Associations with the promise of the West and the problems of western migration have been fundamental to the history of road outlaw films as they are to most Westerns. Both genres look to a mythical natural world, which still exists in the studio era Western but can only be fruitlessly sought in the road outlaw film. While ruggedly individualistic classical Western heroes frequently appear out of a vaguely defined state of nature only to return to it after resolving society's problems,1 classical outlaws of the road film begin as members of society who seek escape from or revolt against it. Their reactive travel odyssey is an effort to overcome their disenfranchised status within the community, and to locate a better alternative outside of it. But the Hollywood road outlaw film, born during the Depression years, is already associated nostalgically with a closed frontier. This closure alters frontier notions of self-law and limitless migration and suggests instead an irony that is indigenous to this subgenre: The protagonist is increasingly entrapped (and usually martyred) the more desperately he/she seeks emancipation. Because this film form implies modernity's confrontation with the frontier's disappearance, it can also heighten the audience's awareness of fundamental contradictions in American ideology, where the celebration of individual freedom and enterprise has simultaneously permitted a history of colonialistic exploitation.

In the classical road film, mainstream social attitudes and authority usually appear at best injudicious, although the male protagonist's method of confrontation and escape also seems doomed, as does the enrollment of a woman as fellow fugitive, who might point to an alternative family/community base in the future. Female road outlaws have usually been represented either as innocent girlfriends and wives, who stand beside their man and suggest the hope of peaceful family alternatives, or as femmes fatales, who betray the male protagonist and the family ideal out of greed. In You Only Live Once (1937), Sylvia Sidney plays the faithful wife who tries to escape to Canada with her fugitive husband and their new baby. Their effort to sustain their family is opposed in the film to a highly politicized and vindictive social authority that finally guns them down.2 Postwar road films such as White Heat and Gun Crazy of 1949, on the other hand, are more likely to indict principal female characters whether they are mothers, girlfriends, or wives, and to make them significant scapegoats for failed mainstream conventions and values. The character played by Peggy Cummings in gmw Crazy, for example, is even more aggressive and ruthless with a gun than is her spouse, which is atypical of the outlaw couple narrative. But she is finally killed by her husband in crime, becoming the extreme that proves the rule. Presumably, nothing is more threatening to patriarchal conventions than a woman who resorts to the tools of aggressive defiance.

Countercultural, antiheroic rebels of the road (who also share historical ties to the tragic heroes of American urban gangsterdorn) begin to appear in the late sixties, although the woman figure continues mainly to perform a supporting role to the male protagonist. Bannie and Clyde (1967) features the economically embittered Clyde, who initiates the ingenue Bonnie into bank thefts as a social act. And in Thieves Like Us (a 1974 remake of the postwar They Live By Night), the woman's odyssey continues to be defined as a romantic choice first and a political choice only secondarily. Unlike the title characters of history and legend in Bonnie and Clyde or in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), however, Thelma and Louise are disinclined to rob banks or trains as a calculated lifestyle. They are neither accomplices to nor promoters of male violence, much less neo femmes noir who seek financial advantage from it. Although Thelma and Louise shares some of the tragi-comic tone of those films, it is twice removed from their nostalgic/revisionary play on Western historicism.

Hints of a significant gender shift in the dominant road protagonist is first notable in Goldie Hawn's role in Sugarland Express (1974), where she plays a mother who is determined at all costs to recover her child from a foster home.3 But as Marsha Kinder points out in her discussion of that character, the "nature of her strength is ambiguous," particularly since she gets her husband killed in the process of getting her baby back. The mother is represented as an "irresponsible child" as much as she is one who "bravely succeeds in fighting the system" (Kinder 6). Furthermore, because her provocation is presented hi purely maternal terms (as it was, incidently, in the factual basis for this story), it remains bound to mainstream traditions.

Thelma and Louise has more important associations with Easy Rider (1969) and the way that film indicts a stringent social conformity, rather than institutional enforcement, as its central concern. It is true that the romantic counterculturalism represented in Easy Rider hardly begins to problematize a sexism that is directly challenged in the contemporary text. But both films highlight the larger social forces that drive their heroes to desperate acts and futile escape efforts. The laid-back motorcyclists in Easy Rider, suddenly wealthy from an illegal drug sale, attempt to travel peacefully across the continent looking for escape and legitimacy, only to run headlong into a violent prejudice that belies America's belief in individual opportunity. "They're gonna talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom," the Jack Nicholson character warns his new sidekicks before he is killed, "But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.... It makes 'em dangerous." This theme is expanded in the popular lyrical music of exuberance and then broken dreams4 that follows the open air flight of Wyatt (Captain America) and Billy, just as it later does Thelma and Louise. But the earlier, low-budget film lacks the audiovisual density that is such a significant backdrop in Ridley Scott's work, where the musical score contributes to an often ironic and self-reflexive commentary.

Easy Rider glorifies the wide open spaces of the Southwest that can support an alternative family f^rm or a struggling communal experiment, but nature in Thelma and Louise is at best a last vestige of mother earth under stress, capable only of a metaphorical promise of reintegratioflT Late in the film, a few nostalgic cowboys on horseback and their longhorn steer momentarily block the women's escape route. But this pastoral setting is soon juxtaposed with a police helicopter that swoops from every angle in pursuit. Scott's cinematic portraits of the highway that stretches through Monument Valley to the desert's horizon is already representative of a Western genre artifact, which can only trap this contemporary female duo in the illusion of flight. Then- physical isolation within the big frame is related to their inability to escape their social experience, which has further distanced them from anything transformational in nature. In the film's opening section, their nearest association with the natural is fishing gear they don't know how to use, and a hand gun initially intended to scare away marauding bears.

Unlike the bad culture/good nature antinomy still being tested in Easy Rider, Thelma and Louise face the uninviting options of poor jobs and marriages, the meat market hustle of pleasure dens like the Silver Bullet, or its horrific parking lot from which flight seems impossible. Where woman has at best represented a nurturing escape from socioeconomic realities for the male hero in patriarchal narratives, there is no analogous alternative haven for woman through man, whose largely objective psychosocial roles have been directly aligned with the cultural dominant. Hence, the confrontation with patriarchal authority by Thelma and Louise hi their flight toward a no longer viable frontier takes the specific form of a rejection of oppressive masculine protectionism.

In more recent road outlaw films such as Something Wild (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), and True Romance (1991), the fugitives' motivations are more psychologically idiosyncratic than in Thelma and Louise. The heterosexual couples in these three films tend to commit crimes out of spontaneous convenience and role-playing. They are more enthralled with fulfilling the images of cultural models such as Louise Brooks, Elvis Presley, or James Dean than with struggling for social justice. Moreover, they are pursued by mafia types (prompted by a psychopathic mother in Wild at Heart) even more extreme than the institutional authorities, which has the effect of further complicating heretofore more simplistic, populist ideological polarities. These young couples may challenge social convention or even crime, and may succeed in expanding the limits of social accommodation, but their pop culture image-consciousness encloses them within artifice. They long mainly for a nostalgic, traditional gender and family organization, and thus remain within an endless circulation of cultural quotations characteristic of postmodern hegemony.

Thelma and Louise also avoids the trap of superficial gender-war movies, typified by female-abuse-and-knee-jerk-revenge plots. In Lipstick (1976), for example, the woman victim of rape pursues and ultimately destroys her original attacker, much as the abused woman in Sleeping With the Enemy finally kills her assailant. In different interviews, Ridley Scott has insisted that Thelma and Louise is "not about rape. It's about choices and freedom" (Taubin 19) or "about looking at someone's history" (Als 56).5 And his film's emphasis does shift in the second half from the protagonists' forced response to abusive males and legalities to their shared determination to regain control of their private destinies. Louise is no more against Thelma's sexual awakening with the hitchhiker than Thelma is against Louise making her own decision about commitment to Jimmy. Nor do they reject the possibility of positive heterosexual relationships in the Utopian future of Mexico.

As a gender transformation of the American road genre, Thelma and Louise refuses to take itself too seriously. The text finally inscribes the comédie disorientation of most of its characters into a larger context of meaning, where neither gender is well served by the current state of heterosexual dynamics. The frustration both women experience with their male counterparts is reflected back on their men's failures to maintain what they assume to be the proper masculine image. The lone Jamaican bicyclist notwithstanding, the inability of any of these characters to fulfill either their own or their mate's expectations underlines the contemporary strains on the heterosexual unit as a viable social or romantic haven.

Margaret Carlson's concern that Thelma and Louise fail to show the intimacy characteristic of female friends may have some justification. But that they "become like any other shootfirst-and-talk-later action heroes" (57), whose violent skills are central to their identity, is contrary to the narrative intent that affords them a charmed escape. After the Harlan Puckett episode, the women are not forced into shootouts so common to couple and buddy initiation films. Louise is shocked when Thelma pulls a gun on a suddenly terrified macho state trooper. And their target practice destruction of a phallic silver tanker truck comes only after a hearing in which the half-wit driver is given an opportunity to apologize for his sexist insults. When Thelma dons the trucker's filthy cap emblazoned with an American flag, her retaliation against working class misogyny begins to include his chauvinistic brand of patriotism.

Thelma and Louise are hardly gritty idealists or vigilantes in revolt against corrupt bureaucracy or men generally. Nor is their inadvertant use of weapons a "Fembo" gender variation on fascistic militancy that would pay homage to it. They do follow generic convention in their ability to shoot straight and temporarily to foil the police, yet they are not working themselves up toward an apocalyptic proving ground of blazing weapons. They constantly articulate and interrogate their impulses, repeatedly checking by phone to clarify their status. Louise explains in her last call to the police: "Got some kind of snowball effect going here. . . . Would you believe me if I told you this whole thing was an accident?" Louise's assumption of a tedious, difficult, and unsympathetic legal process prompts her to explain to Thelma that even if they were eventually to go free from prison for their crimes, it would be at the price of "ruining their lives." To which Thelma replies, "Gee, the law is some tricky shit ain't it?" reducing the arcana of patriarchal legal procedures to an offhand joke.

The experience of Louise and Thelma is offered as a self-consciously hypothetical possibility of feminine response to male aggression. The violent signifiers of the women's handguns filially go unused against the rifles held by the lawmen. Their choice in the end to grasp hands and kiss, to drive over the cliff rather than to face the further violation of bullets or prison, is hardly a proud warrior code of death by arms (as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). Their suicide conclusively negates the self-righteous glory of violent confrontation; it points instead to a subjective, sisterly bond dedicated to mythic if not immediately realizable alternatives. This inclination is made implicitly by the film's framing apparatus. The opening credits are placed over a night-into-day shot of a dirt road winding toward a mountain range, and the film ends with a shot of the women's suspended leap of faith out over a reversed mountain range (the Grand Canyon), which is faded up to white. This closing still frame of the happy tandem driving into air is associated with the Polaroid two-shot briefly frozen on the screen just before their initial departure from home, and seen again (blowing off the back seat) at the film's conclusion. Such an aesthetically controlled encapsulation of their experience moves away from the spectacle of polarizing action drama and supports instead a more existential reading of their reach for liberation. Whether the mythopoeic tendency of this closing image compromises the film's satiric bite remains open to question.

What Thelma learns from the hard-traveled Louise is not simply to be wary of phallocentric control. She also learns to embrace movement and action and choice as viable alternatives to her initial masochistic passivity. As Louise is prone to say, "You get what you settle for." In other words, Thelma and Louise turns the trajectory of its road film duo not so much into a male bashing spectacle as into a metaphor of the longing for a more active and assertive feminine principal of subjectivity.

Gender and Ideological Signification

Both protagonists are introduced in confined settings, restlessly preoccupied with domestic or commercial food service. Thelma ricochets about like a pinball in her kitchen, bumping from the noisy TV to the Mr. Coffee, to the refrigerator, to the phone, and back to a half-chewed candy bar in the fridge again. The microwave dinner, left with a flower and a beer for husband Darryl, becomes her parting testimony to that life. She exchanges fluffy dresses and heels for tight jeans and boots, naive victimization for a risk-taking flamboyance. When Thelma is observed on videotape performing an armed robbery, her audience of policemen and a startled husband see a lovely woman soon to step into unsought notoriety on the evening news. Darryl has been too preoccupied with his status as car sales manager to appreciate his wife or her doll's house predicament until her reaction to it suddenly becomes a public image.

The inadequacy of the men's proprietary masculinity (in an era of random violence) is also made farcical in the scene where the hitchhiker J.D. taunts Darryl about having had sex with Darryl's wife. The comic plays on sex role expectations that occur at the expense of both the men and their mates, all of whom are trapped in an artificial ersatz culture, serve as mild teasers here to more determined acts of aggression. For Thelma, the move from an oppressive domestic world to its dangerous, freewheeling opposite on the open road becomes a shocking revelation. Her transformation begins in the smokey haze of a Western-style roadhouse called the Silver Bullet, where she meets Harlan Puckett.

Harlan represents more than a rapist/villain who unleashes raw phallic power and motivates the women's escape. He is also metonymic of the fearsome underside of the American Dream, rather comfortably exaggerated here as a working class extreme of sleazy, macho attitudes. Harlan seduces Thelma with alcohol and flattery, encouraging her desire for release as the band leader sings about "the land of opportunity." After a faddish Western Une dance, Harlan pushes Thelma outside and into the parking lot, where his seduction suddenly turns brutal when she tries to resist him. Harlan is a barroom regular whose particular hustle happens to be young women. He is not a pathological case so much as a logical extension of learned expectations of immediate gratification.

Harlan bespeaks the extremes of competitive flattery and consumption, that stroking solicitation that feeds on a sexual politics largely defined by dominant commerce. In a social milieu of heightened expectations, Harlan assumes his consumer pleasure as an American right, to be taken to extremes with relative impunity so long as he is paying the bills.6 Thelma is also vulnerable to the bombardment of messages that encourage impulsiveness. Shortly before she convinces Louise to enter the Silver Bullet, where she wants to "have some fun," the women are seen on the open road with their radio blasting Dow Jones averages between pop songs. The pervasive commercial discourse that constantly promotes needs apparently has its down side in heightened frustration, lawlessness, and vulnerability. And when Thelma eventually finds herself overpowered on the back of a car, there is no promised Lone Ranger with his trademark silver bullets who comes to the rescue.7 ("Silver bullets" have in any case been reduced to a beer can packaging device marketed by Joseph Coors.)

Significantly, it isn't Harlan's physical attack on Thelma but his in-your-face verbal attack on Louise that triggers the film's most obvious turning point. As Louise tries to leave the scene of Harlan's crime, he shouts "Suck my cock!" She accommodates him instead with her own version of phallic violation-not to his face as the screenplay originally called for (Khouri 118),8 but straight to his heart, the true seat of choice between compassion and ruthlessness. Louise kills Harlan with a gun because she can no longer find the words or wherewithal to deflect his sexist dominion whether she holds the weapon or not. Louise has already been victimized by a similar although unnamed trauma in Texas.

Louise draws the Une at this juncture because she knows that Harlan is correct, that the power of phallic patriarchy will simply throw her back on her own marginality, isolation, and hopelessness. She seems unable to escape repeated instances of real and psychic rape no matter what she does. The ideological lesson in the film lies partly here, and in her equal despair resulting from the violent measure she feels forced to take. The bark of the gun is her word of authority that ultimately narrows her options in the narrative and perpetuates the cycle of violence by violence.9 Force is neither liberating nor laughable for Louise, however, who continues to be traumatized rather than inspired or transfigured after the shooting. Violence does have repercussions in this film, as much from the degrading word or sign as from the deed.

Like Louise, Thelma comes to reject the lie of protective seduction and tyranny, but not also the role of good father and family. When Thelma holds the state patrolman hostage, she encourages him to be good to his wife and kids at home so that they won't turn out like she has. She also shares in Louise's willingness to communicate with the Arkansas police chief Slocum, although he is only an institutional representative, an enforcer rather than a maker of law, who can at best try to assure the protagonists' safe entry into the court system or postpone their deaths as fugitives. His limited options as a father substitute reflect the regime of the phallic signifier, where commerce tends either to disregard spontaneous human concerns, or to elevate them into flashy spectacles that encourage over-simplification, objectification and fragmentation.

When Thelma tells Louise that despite the threat of the law she can't go back home, Louise says, "I know what you mean. I don't think Jimmy would even marry me for real now. You think he's gonna consent to some kinda death row wedding? I don't wanna end up on the damn Geraldo show." The closure of the past and the rejection of a degrading future of commercially mediated distortions forces them into a heightened realization. Hence, Thelma's initiation is accomplished in a conscious rejection not simply of a corrupted paternal principle, but of the alienating code of image supremacy that contributes to it. The political-economic overtones of a law established mainly to protect property, and of a language and media that assign value in consumer terms, are what the more introspective Louise helps Thelma to recognize. They may die from the initial choice of guns, but they also seem to live (however fleetingly) in the recognition of mutual support in what is finally a non-participatory form of resistance. Louise resolves to have nothing further to do with the bating, reductive world of Geraldo television.

The culture of mediated consumer capitalism has abstracted sexual desire from personal relationships and projected it, mainly through dismembered images of the female body, across an endless circulation of commodity forms. Scott's film largely resists this sexual hard sell in its representation of Thelma. The peep-show gaze is made self-conscious in an early scene in the car when Louise takes offense at Thelma's hiked dress and the frame notably excludes Thelma's bare thighs from view. And when Louise bends forward in an undershirt to wash her face at an open tap, the angle of view quickly changes rather than linger on her partially exposed breasts. While the usurpation of the woman's body has been central to commercial marketing strategies, and to patterns of representation in cinema as described in Laura Mulvey's work,10 this text inclines toward a larger context of erotic awareness. The hitchhiker J.D., who plays the seducer and thief that gives and betrays as well as any femme fatale ever managed to do, suggests a playful reversal on seductress stereo-types, which has already become a part of contemporary culture's sliding gender signification. But this more sexually balanced eroticism can also imply exploitation that supersedes gender.

Notably, while Thelma's new confidence in her ability to direct her desires results in sexual climax with J.D., that desire she thinks she controls in her "private" motel room becomes an ecstasy with a hidden agenda. She is financially raped by J.D. 's larceny in a situation of sexual pleasure that recalls her near physical rape after dancing and drinking with Harlan. The association of these two violently charged scenes points to a broader interpretation of the way Thelma becomes victimized, not only by the manipulation of men, but by her own solipsistic insistence on reckless abandon, which she is warned about earlier by Louise. Thelma proceeds to attribute J.D.'s money heist to bad luck, again failing to recognize her own naive participation in the parasitical opportunism that surrounds her. It is Thehria's subsequent act of theft at the convenience store-based on J.D.'s instructions using a hair dryer to mime a hand gunthat represents a desperate renegotiation of the complex codes with which she must contend.

Her sudden leap from victim of rip-off sex to armed thief demonstrates the alignment of an abused private need with the learned attitudes and maneuvers of economic exploitation. Thelma's experience on the road forces her to recognize a broader spectrum of sexual-economic domination that has no one clear source and yet surrounds her with its signifiers. This narrative construction of the world of Thelma and Louise suggests the cultural/ideological analysis of postmodernists such as Jean Baudrillard, who have emphasized the perpetual solicitation of consumer desire. It continually grinds down essential personal difference and the balances of nature with simulation and "signs... that become the disguises of unrestrained seduction"(153). Thelma can no more effectively use a gun against such a ubiquitous force (this overheated marketplace of competitive consumption and greed) than she can leap from the televised videotape of herself to explain why she has chosen to rob a convenience store. Significantly, Thelma turns to the weapon precisely where she finds it essential (however ill-considered) in order to renegotiate her ties to Louise.

Thelma evolves, with Louise's support, away from unquestioning conformity to marital and consumer dependency, and toward a psychic development that would distinguish the "Law of the Father" from social law and the patriarchal signifier. The Oedipal crisis described by Freud and further elaborated by Lacan in terms of the paternal Symbolic (Heath 113) has direct relevance to Thelma's initiatory experience. Thelma's negative confrontation with the Symbolic-in the brutal form of Harlan and the seductive form of the hitchhiker-is especially noteworthy because of the presence of the active mother figure Louise, who first rescues Thelma and then must be rescued by her. When Thehna acts independently from the maternal figure and takes on the Symbolic realm directly, she breaks the infantile pattern. As Jane Gallop explains in The Daughter's Seduction, the young woman must confront the paternal order to be able to distinguish serf from mother and therefore the condition of maternal dependency ( 123). Thelma's psychological break from Louise, however, simultaneously prompts the recognition of her own socioeconomic passivity, which has endangered her under the signifying authority of patriarchy.

The issue of visibility and credibility in this text may be seen at work in the relative levels of social empowerment and action assigned to each character. Marian's attempted rape of Thelma goes unseen by the authorities but Louise's shooting does not, just as J.D.'s theft is largely invisible while Thelma's reaches the visibility level of a public event. Furthermore, both Harlan's and J.D.'s acts of aggression against Thelma are reflected back on Louise, where effects are shown to pile up beyond the rationale of any visual or spoken cause. It is the nondisclosure of Louise's Texas experience that finally becomes the film's most consistent reference to the idea of an unspeakable (or unrepresentable) psychic trauma. Louise already understands the rules of dominant signification, which suggest that the woman victim isn't really being hurt (or her protest effaced) unless she can demonstrate that violation in a way that may further harm and isolate her. And so it is that the women's visible acts of retaliation, while momentarily celebratory, also demonstrate the trap of reductive, violent spectacle as a solution. Louise feels compelled to exert the power of the gun while longing for a form of participation that doesn't require it. She may threaten the place of law and logic, but her intent is to extricate herself from the circuit of value production and its formal institutions of enforcement. Her intentions also impact Thelma, whose defensive criminality is associated with personal enlightenment rather than with sexual, economic, or political conquest.

Late in the film, after Thelma and Louise are told by phone that they will be charged with murder and must decide whether they will come out of their predicament dead or alive, they drive on into the beauty of the Western desert. "I feel awake," Thelma says, "wide awake. I don't ever remember feelin' this awake." And indeed the visual and aural signs in this closing section are orchestrated to support Thelma's revelation. All along Ridley Scott has filled the background of his fugitive's escape with the vestments of a mobile consumer civilization-the oil-fields, freight trains, trailer trucks, crop-dusting planes, and ribbons of highways bordered by telephone, power, and telegraph Unes.11 Gradually this scenery (surely idiomatic of a long history of colonialistic exploitation of the continent) gives way to abandoned shacks and farming equipment, dirt roads, and the blank staring faces of the excluded and desolate with whom the protagonists, particularly Louise, share a doomed familiarity.

When Louise tosses her lipstick and later trades her jewelry for an old hat, she bids goodbye to exploitation and realigns herself with essentials. In a related image, Thelma looks in the side view mirror, watching simultaneously the dramatic landscape that is coming and that has passed in full recognition of her present moment. The final scenes of the film practically swallow the travelers in a twilight expanse of huge canyons, sunsets, and sunrises. The landscape reprises America's history as well as its mythic cinematic representations of the West. And it is in the spirit of both that the women bear the warning of a failing experiment in freedom. They can only join hands in hope as they drive over the precipice and away from the high-powered weapons that would target them in the cross-hair sights of a depersonalizing authority.

Thelma and Louise reflects not only on America's violent history in relation to the place of women, but on the myth of expansion and material progress that can consume both sexes and catalyze sexist exploitation. More specifically, Khouri-Scott's film accomplishes a transformation of the road outlaw genre by forcing its central narrative conflicts into the perceptual terms of contemporary sign culture. America is shown to have aged from a land of natural bounty and promise to a landscape of simulational spectacle and defensive protectionism. Ridley Scott's images suggest the impact of a voracious consumerism, which has·buried the old frontier under an interconnected urban grid of commerce, signified here by food and motel chains, strip malls, and redundant bi-ways and parking lots where even the Lone Ranger isn't safe.